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Your UI design polls don’t add value because they lack context? Find out 3 ways to change that.
Advance your vocabulary and overall design skills, build user scenarios and create context with inspiration from the design thinking How Might We, Jobs To Be Done and Behavior Driven Development.
Context is everything. Once the moment has come to show your work to peers, stakeholders or the public, you already have given the user scenarios a lot of thought. But have you really doubled down in your language? And yes, designers should care about the words in their UI as well. Choosing the exact words as a fundamental part of your design has a larger impact than you might think.
“Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.” — Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics
Spoiler alert: which design is “better” or “more accurate” — that is just not cutting it.
In this article I discuss
- how we can fill words with contextual meaning so they serve our purpose
- how frameworks enable all of us, including non-writers, to hone our vocabulary skills
- how user research will always help your case and the wordings you choose.
The inspiration for this short piece came from a comment on LinkedIn I had left under a post of a UI designer asking a this-or-that question, showing two designs competing with each other:
“Which UI is better?”
“Which UI is more accurate?”
My quick, un-revised comment went like this:
